


so that i can stop being silent

by happyberry



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Afterlife, Domestic, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-16 01:03:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19307488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyberry/pseuds/happyberry
Summary: Valery watches the birds in the tree as they hop from branch to branch in the early evening light and then dance away from one another only to come back in the end, every time.At the end of summer, Boris finds Valery for the last time.





	so that i can stop being silent

Valery’s just returned from town and is midway through slicing up an apple when a knock comes at the door.

It’s a knock he hasn't heard in a long time and that in and of itself is enough of a reason for him to hesitate before answering. He feels catapulted back into another time and place, his mind racing to explain why he's hearing that distinctive sharp rap of knuckles against his door.

The knock comes again, and it strikes Valery as demanding to be heard. He lets the apple fall to the side, watches it roll against the porcelain of his plate, and goes to answer the door, fighting against the part of himself that says this is a bad idea.

Perhaps this is what he's been waiting here for, he thinks, feeling strangely calm with the possibility.

Knife still in hand, he pulls the door open with a movement that makes him feel deliriously reckless, and then takes a step backwards.

For a moment, neither of them says anything.

Then Valery speaks, because it’s impossible not to.

“Boris?”

The smile on Boris’ face is tinged with regret. “Hello, Valera.”

—

Valery offers Boris half of the apple, which is covered in green skin and sure to be bitingly sour. Boris shakes his head and looks more pale than Valery remembers him looking last time they saw one another. Thinner, as well.

“I suppose I should ask the obvious question,” Valery says as they sit opposite one another in the kitchen. He has it decorated nicely, he thinks, in blues and whites. He painted the chairs at the table himself, something he wouldn't have done before he came here. It never would have even occurred to him then that he could do such a thing.

“How did I find you?” Boris says, and Valery nods. The apple is bitter, he was right. “You made it hard, you know.”

“That was the point.” Valery gestures around them. “I assumed no one would be so stupid as to come all this way to find me. Obviously I was wrong.”

“Obviously,” Boris says, with a sound that’s halfway between a laugh and a cough. “When I figured it out, when it became clear to me that I could come after you—well, making that decision was easy.”

“Was it?” Valery is genuinely intrigued. He hadn't expected for Boris to follow him, for the two of them to ever see each other again. “And did you figure that out before or after the fall?”

“Before. Well before. And if you’ll pardon the expression, you dodged a bullet, not having to deal with the collapse."

“I preferred the rope.” Valery smiles thinly at the uncomfortable look on Boris’ face. “I’ve had years to come to terms with it, Boris, it’s fine. I'm not in pain or suffering. Only lonely and far from anyone I know." He taps a finger against the tabletop and looks to the side. "Until now.”

The silence between them is more comfortable than it has any right to be, and Valery gets up without much worry, clearing off the table and counter. He has no misconceptions about their relationship at this point, painfully aware of the chasm between them as created by radio silence on either end, but he’s also never once felt his trust in Boris waver.

That much has stayed fast and true.

“So,” Boris says from where he’s still sitting, hand over his mouth and voice half-muffled. “Here we are.”

“It’s quiet,” Valery says, turning on the sink and working to keep his hands busy. “I like it here.”

“I would have been here months ago if you'd left me a map, you know.”

Valery looks over his shoulder and sees that there’s almost a smile on Boris’ face.

“Funny.” He turns from the sink, toweling off his hands. “And now that you’ve found me, what’s the plan? Will you drag me back from death to Moscow? Does the reformation of the Russian state depend on my testimony in a court somewhere? Am I to be risen so that I might tell the people that Gorbachev yelled at me on the phone once?”

“No, no, stop it you.” Boris’ hands are on the table and Valery keeps his eyes on them as he speaks. He feels the full realization of what them being here together means like a physical force, like gravity pushing him down and he clutches the towel in his hands tighter. “I thought for now—do you have a spare bed, Valera?”

Valery looks up to his face and sees nothing there except for genuine, foolish hope. It startles him, to see that on Boris’ face, of all people, and he thinks that perhaps moving on has changed him in a way it hasn't changed Valery. It's a sobering thought, and it shakes something within him back into place.

“As it happens,” he says, leaning back against the counter, “I do. It’s old and the bed springs squeak and it will need some dusting before you sleep on it, but if you can handle that, it’s yours.”

“I think I’ll manage,” Boris says, almost mockingly sincere.

Valery huffs out something nearing a laugh for the first time in years.

“Alright. Let’s get you settled in.”

—

Valery wakes early these days in a way that starkly contrasts the his mornings in Moscow, where the sun was reticent to shine through the dusty windows and his alarm clock was so jarring he sometimes fell out of bed in a way that would have been comical if it weren’t actually happening to him.

Here, he wakes up naturally, at no appointed time, to light peeking in through the window across the room from his bed or, sometimes, to the sound of a car backfiring down the road. He makes coffee for himself and gets dressed and heads to his workshop in the barn, pulling the door open and not minding the wet grass under his boots.

He drops leftovers into the bowls he has set out for strays and scratches Lola, the calico barn cat who came with the house, behind the ears where she has fallen asleep on top of one of the bales of hay. Half the time Lola stirs from her nap and blinks at him as if to say, _Why?_ before settling back down.

Then he sits at his workbench and gets to work.

This morning is different than most others, but only slightly. The main difference is that he’s careful as he closes the front door to the house and, consequently, unsurprised when he isn’t disturbed until midway through the morning by Boris, blinking at him from the doorway of the barn.

“Good morning,” Valery says, yelling over the sound of the sander he’s using before it occurs to him that he should simply turn it off. “Did I wake you?”

“Yes, but it’s fine. You’re—what are you doing?” Boris looks a step away from staggered, wrapped up as he is in a robe Valery has never seen before. It’s grey and checkered and slightly too small for him, which is endearing.

“Making a box.” Valery begins removing his gloves and then realizes that his answer was criminally vague. “Come here, see.” He points to the joints he’s in the midst of sanding into shape, and the base that he’s already fitted together. “Another couple of hours and I’ll have it nearly constructed. After that, I’ll do some woodwork to make it look presentable, and then be able to give it to the woman on the other side of town.”

Boris is fully staggered now, which gives Valery no end of self satisfaction. “You mean to tell me you, Valery Legasov, nuclear physicist, are in the business of carpentry now?”

“Yes, well. I was more of a chemist than anything, in all truth.” Valery claps his hands together. “Would you like to see a project I’ve completed?”

Boris says something that Valery doesn’t bother listening to, knowing he’ll want to, and moves past him in a way that stirs anxiety up in his chest. He can feel himself moving too fast, far too excited to share this part of his life with someone else and with Boris in particular. More than once he’s imagined doing this, thought of how it would be to share this with the only person he’s ever felt truly understood him.

He has a storage cabinet in the back of the barn, past the bales of hay that Lola lounges on and tucked into a dry corner under a single light bulb. Boris follows him there and surprises Valery by holding one of the doors open for him while he pulls out the smallest box from the highest shelf.

“A jewelry box,” he explains, feeling embarrassed by the offering now. He finished the project half a year ago, and it’s by far his most intricate, with a leaf pattern on top and stained wood, cutouts on the side. “I thought to make it and trade it in town, but haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.”

Boris coughs into his fist and looks to the side, as if uncomfortable, which makes the anxiety in Valery’s chest flare up like a live wire.

He hastens to put the box away, saying, “It’s just a hobby, to pass the time,” but Boris’ hand clasps his forearm and stops him.

“No, Valera, you misunderstand,” he says, having the decency to look abashed. “It’s only that for as long as I’ve known you, I don’t think I’ve had you show me anything you worked on that you were proud of.”

“Oh.” Valery stands there, his eyes drifting to Boris’ hand on his arm, the grip still tight and the air between them heavy. “It was hard to be proud of what we were doing. This is...one of the first things I made to order was a toy box for the family down the road. I got to see the girls put their things inside. They’d never had something like that before and I thought, okay. I’ll do this then.”

“Jesus,” Boris says, and Valery looks up at him.

There’s a look in his eyes, but for the life of him Valery can’t understand it.

—

They head to town in the afternoon and Boris insists on them taking his rental car.

“American made,” he says with some disdain. “There wasn’t anything else available, so it will have to do.”

Valery, who hasn’t spent much time in cars since coming here, doesn’t mind much. And while he doesn’t mention it, he can admit it’s a nice car that handles the dirt roads of the village well.

In town, there isn’t much to be seen, just some stores, a school, and a library, and Valery leads Boris to the general store, pointing out various locales of notoriety as they walk.

“I saw a child thrown from that on my first visit here,” he says of the mechanical horse out front, which boasts that every ride is free. “I thought he’d start wailing, but he laughed instead, and that’s been the general feeling here ever since.”

“Odd place,” Boris says, and Valery agrees, but he also rather likes it.

The general store is too small for the amount of good packed inside, with aisles only just big enough for one person to pass through, and Valery is relieved to see its deserted as they enter. He sets about throwing produce into a basket, wondering how long Boris is planning to stay. Another day or two won't take much planning, but beyond that he'll have to start purposefully stocking more.

“How long—” he begins before he turns to see Boris being accosted by the grocer. She’s all of five feet and has Boris backed up against the soda crackers.

“Shit.” He drops both the tomatoes he was looking at into his basket and heads their way, steeling himself to looking her in the eye. “Is something wrong? He...he’s with me.”

“Oh?” As soon as she sees him approaching, she backs off, though not as far as Boris would probably like. She’s wiry and small and incredibly imposing. “You could have said so, Valery.”

“You’re right, I absolutely should have.” Valery shoots Boris a look over her head and then smiles at her, as sweet as he knows how. She’s half his age and, though it took a good month, seems to see him as a bit of a bumbling uncle at this point.

She sighs, casting a gaze in Boris’ direction for a second and then moving towards the front counter. “Tell him not to look so suspicious by the wheat.”

As she walks away, Valery shrugs. “There’s nothing I can do if you’re going to look suspicious in the wheat aisle, Boria.”

The grocer tallies up their order when they’re done making selections and asks Valery when he thinks the bread box he’s making her will be done. She squeezes his hand before he leaves and Valery lets her, not minding Boris staring at him as they leave.

“She lost her family, you know,” he says, loading things into the back of the car. “Or, I suppose, they lost her. Either way, she's a bit...”

“Protective,” Boris finishes, not bothering to help with the groceries. “I noticed.”

The ride back to the house is mostly silent, and Valery spends the majority of it mentally planning meals around this unexpected addition to his table. He tries to remember what Boris likes, which isn’t so much a matter of remembering what they ate in Pripyat as it is remembering what they talked about missing the most.

He’s about to ask Boris if he’ll eat cabbage rolls, when Boris says, “Do they know who you are here?”

They’re pulling up to the house, Boris driving onto the gravel of the driveway set between the barn and the front porch, a couple of birds flying up and away to the tree in the middle of the yard.

“Hm?”

“The woman in the store called you by name.” Boris turns the key and the ignition grounds to a halt.

“She did?” Boris nods. “She did. Well, they know me as Valery and, well. I needed a last name I could remember easily, so.”

It takes Boris a minute to catch on. “Mine?”

“If it bothers you—”

“No, no. I’m just surprised.” And, based off his tone of voice and for reasons Valery doesn’t feel like examining too closely, _pleased._  “It doesn't really matter what your name is anymore, does it?”

“No,” Valery admits. “But it felt easier to pretend to be someone else, even if that someone else was only a degree removed from who I am.”

They sit in silence for a moment, and Valery begins to watch the birds in the tree, hopping from branch to branch in the early evening light.

“Who will we tell them I am, if they ask?” Boris asks.

Valery keeps his eyes on the birds, watching the way they dance away from one another only to come back in the end, every time.

“I think, Boria, we’ll tell them whatever we like.”

—

Time comes and goes like waves from there on out and Boris does indeed eat the cabbage rolls that Valery makes for him.

In the first few weeks after Boris arrives, he keeps a surprisingly regular schedule, interrupting Valery’s mornings in a not altogether unwelcome way. It’s been quite a long time since anyone made Valery something to drink, even if Boris’ attempts at tea are just short of disastrous in the beginning.

The evenings find them joined by Lola on the porch, discussing politics in a way that makes Valery feel they’ve taken up fencing. It’s easier for them both to be openly dissenting here, though they also both have lines they won’t cross and causes they still feel devoted to.

For Valery, he likes the idea of what it all could have been, had things been different, and for Boris he argues that nowhere was there ever pride in everyday work like there was in the halls of the buildings they walked.

Valery points to the sky one evening, the paintbrush colors of a disappearing sunset on the horizon as he says, “It’s like claiming the sky is always this beautiful. It’s not that it never is. We’re looking at it right now, and I won’t argue the point. But it’s for an hour or two and, even then, only at the right angle. The rest of the time there’s smog in the air and you barely bother to look up.”

Boris, he notices, doesn’t disagree.

The weather is a grasping hand trying to hold tight to the edge of summer as its final days trudge by, and the beginning of autumn is rainy and humid as a result. Valery is thankful for Boris’ American car at times like this, something which he takes care to mention as often and as loudly as possible, if only to hear Boris groan in annoyance.

The grocer is still wary of Boris, but she also lets him know when they have oranges in stock for no clearly discernible reason.

“I don’t like oranges,” Boris tells Valery in the soup aisle.

“Well, we’re getting them,” Valery responds, because he refuses to disappoint someone who seems very sure they were waiting on a shipment of oranges.

On the other side of town, the woman who ordered the music box kisses both of Valery’s cheeks when he delivers it to her.

“I'm sorry it took so long,” he says, aware of Boris waiting in the car outside as she wrings her hands and looks at him with watery eyes in her foyer. “I had some trouble with the mechanism inside, making sure it played the song like you wanted it to.”

The song is playing in the background, a wind-up version of the first twelve notes of  _Für Elise_ on loop.

“It’s so beautiful.” She reaches for one of his hands and he lets her take it, feeling slightly awkward. “I haven’t had anything nice since, since—”

Valery has never been good at comforting someone who’s crying, and he struggles here, only able to hold her hand in his and say some words he can’t even recall later, meaningless things in the face of the grief she’s feeling. He felt it himself at one point and knows that Boris does, too, even if he chooses to keep it to himself. It's a deeply personal thing, and he feels overwhelmingly unequipped to do anything in the face of it.

“What will you put in it?” he asks, when the tears have mostly subsided and only her shoulders are shaking.

He’s worried the question is too obvious, stupid and plain, but she smiles at him. “All the things that make me feel better in moments like these,” she tells him.

He takes her words out to the car and Boris nods as he shares them, looking out the rear window as he backs down the driveway.

“How much did she end up paying you?” he asks.

“Pay? Oh, no. Sometimes I trade for things, but...I don’t ask for money.”

“You should. You make beautiful things, Valera.”

Valery’s eyes are on his hands in his lap, taking measure of their newly formed calluses, of the cracks on his knuckles. “Maybe,” he says. “But for now—have you ever made someone happy and thought, you know what, that’s enough?”

“Yes,” Boris says after only a second of hesitation, voice gruff with an edge Valery has never heard before, “yes, I have.”

—

The kitchen sink backs up in autumn.

It’s backed up with tree roots and grime and it’s Boris who fixes it.

He spends several mornings assessing the problem, complaining about it and making tomato and cheese sandwiches, and then drives into town and returns with a red toolbox so shiny Valery almost thinks it’s a joke.

Then he fixes the sink in an afternoon.

Valery stands in the kitchen next to him, and watches as the water splashes out of the faucet into a clean sink, the white porcelain looking glossy.

“That’s all there is to it,” Boris says.

And Valery, after a beat, says, “Have you ever put a door back on its hinges?”

It turns out Boris never has, but also that he’s willing to take a look at the back screen door, which has been leaned up against the side of the house since Valery moved in. And from there the list grows. The broken window that’s covered with a tarp in the barn, the backwards knobs in the upstairs tub, and the flickering light in the cellar.

“Have you always been good at these things?” Valery asks from where he’s sitting at the top of the stairs. “Have I just not been paying attention?”

“Have you always been good at carpentry?” Boris calls back to him from where he’s uprooting faulty wiring lodged into poorly done drywall.

“No, it just. When I came here it felt like...what I should have been doing all along.”

“Well,” Boris claps his hands together and Valery watches the movement of his shoulder blades under his shirt, “I feel the same. Only for me, the task seems to be making your life easier.”

Valery cooks dinner that night, as he does most nights, and sets the table for the potatoes and chicken.

Their hands brush in the process of eating several times, as they pass sour cream and exchange the pitcher of water. It’s been happening more often lately, these fleeting touches, and while Valery initially thought it was something he allowed to happen he’s come to the realization that Boris isn’t shying away from it either.

It’s torturous in a way that makes him feel like his veins are on fire, like the only thing that will soothe the burns is another pass of their hands over one another. Almost touching but not quite.

On the porch, Boris sits and Valery stands, while Lola passes between his legs and chirps at him.

“Have you noticed there’s no alcohol here?” he says, halfway convinced Boris wouldn’t mind if he placed a hand on his shoulder.

“No cigarettes, either.” Boris sniffs in a way that tells Valery he finds this bothersome, but not overly so. If it were, Valery knows he’d have yelled at someone in town weeks ago. “It’s a strange place, isn’t it, Valera?”

Valery’s hand hovers over Boris’ shoulder, and then he pulls back.

“Yes, it is. But it’s ours.”

—

He starts work on a box for Boris halfway through what he thinks is October.

Holding nails between his teeth and with a pencil behind his ear, he finds himself lost in the act.

When he first came here, it occurred to him the second he stepped into the barn. It came stocked fully, with a sander and a circular saw, with tape measures, hammers, and knives.

He’d never tried to create anything so ambitious before, never had the extra time to devote to a task that could so wholeheartedly absorb his obsessive nature. He’d never seen the point in attempting to do anything that he couldn’t do perfectly, but this had felt different.

There were no nuclear institutes or reactors, no emergencies in need of a captain to guide them safely to shore. He’d only been asked to pay for the house and land, and told by the young woman at the general store that despite any hesitations she had about his character, the deli counter was fully stocked and his for the taking.

Woodworking didn’t come easily to him, and nothing he made the first few months was worth anything. Most of it was embarrassing, until he’d managed to cobble together a spice box for his own kitchen, a small little thing to be set on his counter.

He’d stained the wood himself and carved divets into the sides and it wasn’t exactly beautiful, but it worked the way he needed it to. It served a purpose, and that felt right.

From there, he’d improved tenfold and over the course of his first year living in the house he began to make promises.

A couple of toy boxes, a jewelry box for a widower in a headscarf, and a hope chest for a couple so young it made his heart ache.

Before Boris and his American car, Valery walked to town and back and people would stop to speak to him, to ask him to make them things or thank him for the things they now had.

The woman on the other side of town had stopped him and held his hand so tightly he thought it might fall off, and he’d promised her on the side of the road that if he couldn’t make what she wanted, no one could.

“I’ll have it for you before the summer’s over,” he told her, and he had only missed the mark by a little.

For Boris, he doesn’t know what he’s making. It’s medium sized and simple and he’s decided to carve the birds from the tree in the yard onto the top. Boris told them they were swallows one evening, as they watched them swoop down to the ground and then back up again.

Valery can’t tell them apart from robins, but the difference matters to Boris and he’s determined to get it right.

He skips dinners and rides into town and forgets to thank Boris for fixing the creak in the stairs. He can feel himself growing distant, but he tells himself it will be worth it in the end, right up until Boris knocks a bowl of sour cream to the side one night and pushes his chair back at the kitchen table.

Valery stares up at him, unimpressed.

“Is there even a point to me being here any longer?” Boris asks, red faced and annoyed. “Or have you gotten your fill of me?”

With a sigh, Valery presses at his eyes underneath his glasses. “What do you mean.” It’s barely even a question and he isn’t sure how to explain himself.

“I mean, Valera, have you had a good look at me and decided this isn’t what you want? You spend every waking minute in the barn, and then the few times we’re together you hardly _speak_.” Boris' words are coming through gritted teeth and he's averting his eyes. It's as if he's ashamed by his own emotions.

Valery doesn’t wish for the taste or smell of cigarettes any longer, but he does miss the opportunities they afforded him for silence. A second to regroup. His hand itches for a lighter that he can flick to life, and something to hold between his fingers.

“Come with me,” he says, getting up and walking to the front door.

Boris follows him, complaining about the evening temperature drop even as gravel crunches underfoot, and Valery opens the barn door himself, telling Boris to wait just inside.

His cabinet full of projects is nearly empty at this point, with anything new having fallen to the wayside since the summer ended. He drops Boris’ box onto his work table under the hum of the light bulb and gestures in its direction.

Boris leans over to inspect it. The rough edges and pencil marks, the suggestion of birdlike figures on the top, the half-stained color.

“You made this for me?”

Valery nods and leans against the table, tracing the outline of what was intended to be a wing. “A work in progress. I can’t get it right. It’s missing something. Maybe you can tell me what.”

“Hm.” Valery watches as Boris reaches out and pulls the box towards himself. The way he touches it makes Valery feel lightheaded. He’s gentle with it, his touch soft and nearly reverent and Valery imagines for half a second what that touch might feel like on his skin.

“Well?” he says, clearing his throat, forcefully interrupting his own thoughts.

“Are these the birds from the yard?” Boris’ fingers are on their backs, on the suggestion of the branches beneath them.

“They’re meant to be, yes.”

“There should be....” Boris is silent for a moment, searching for a word that Valery waits for with his breath held. “Affection. They aren’t just two birds in a tree, they’re together there.”

Valery can’t look away, and when Boris finally meets his gaze it feels like something he’s been waiting for since the beginning.

“Together,” he echoes, as he places his hand on top of Boris’. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

—

First snow drops upon them while they’re sleeping one night and neither of them leaves the house for several days as a result.

Valery wears a robe which he found at the back of the wardrobe in his room, and Boris eventually complains enough that he ends up in two fleece sweaters and his too-small, checkered robe with a bowl of soup in front of him in the evening, and between it all Valery finds himself thinking of another winter and the way things might have been.

It had been when they were staying on the edges of Pripyat, in the months leading up to the problem being as solved as it could be, considering the circumstances.

They stayed in hollowed out apartments, stripped of the things that belonged to the family that had lived there, and it had been hard to sleep at night. Sometimes Valery would lie awake for hours and other times he wouldn’t even play that game. He’d sit by lamp light going over blueprints and documentation and find himself wrapped up in a question he couldn’t find the answer to.

One night there had been a knock on his door, a rap of knuckles so distinctive he’d just yelled out, “Come in,” and not even looked up as Boris entered.

“Burning the midnight oil?” Boris had said, which was what he always said when he found Valery like this. It felt like a dance of some sort, like Boris thought it was the first step he needed to make so they could do things right.

“Yes, well,” Valery leaned back in his chair, “someone has to.”

They’d talked about some useless things, a couple of rumors that didn’t mean anything in the end. An engineer from the first reactor had to be pulled away from the control panel because he didn’t trust anyone else with it and some college kids from Belarus had trekked over and tried to sneak onto the property.

“I don’t envy the people who have to deal with these things,” Valery said, hating the idea of all of it. He’d never been good at overseeing people and faltered in the face of resistance when the stakes weren’t high enough for him to forget himself. He had a feeling the Belarusian kids might have convinced him to give them a guided tour, if they’d had the chance.

“And I don’t envy you,” Boris replied, looking serious for a long moment.

He wasn’t usually serious with Valery, these days. Intense, certainly, but he was too quick to offset any uncomfortable cracks in their relationship with humor to be considered _serious_ when it was just the two of them. Now, though, Valery saw the weight of it all on him. It was easy to recognize. He saw it in the mirror, as well.

Boris looked like a man who knew what was coming.

“What will you do after this?” he asked, after a brief silence. “I’ve been wondering.”

Valery chewed on the inside of his cheek for half a second and stopped himself from saying what he wanted to, responding, “I’ll go back to work at the institute. Before I left there was talk I might be in charge come the next election. And after this...I think that’s likely.”

“Ah.” Boris had nodded because that made sense, but there had been a look in his eye that seemed to say something different, though Valery wasn’t sure what.

“And you?”

“Oh, the same as you. Just right back to what I was doing before.”

They’d talked for another fifteen, twenty minutes, and Valery had felt the time slipping away between them like sand. They were here for another couple of weeks at least—maybe even a month—but he could feel that there was something between them tonight, the last chance for this to evolve beyond where things currently stood.

Still, he’d said nothing differently that he usually would, and he’d done nothing differently as well.

The only other thing that had felt meaningful was when Boris got up to leave and then asked, “What are you looking at all of this for, anyway?”

“It’s just...a question I keep coming back to.” Valery pushed the papers on his table forward in the low lighting of the room, and wished he had the courage to ask Boris not to leave.

“What question?” Boris lingered in the doorway and it really was true. Valery could have stopped him at any time. But he didn’t.

“Over and over, I ask myself, have I done absolutely everything I can, and have I done it all right?”

“That’s not something you can know the answer to, Valera,” Boris had said before he left for good and Valery wonders about that now.

In this little house on the far edge of a nowhere town, while Boris yells at the hot water tank in the basement and Valery calls down that the soup is ready, he wonders if Boris was only half-right when he said that.

Here, he feels he must know something, or at least he’s on his way to figuring it out—the one right turn he took in his life and where it's brought him to now. All that's left is what he'll do next.

—

On the coldest day of the winter, when they’ve just returned from town and Valery is hanging up his scarf in the hallway, he listens to Boris chatter with a smile on his face.

It’s something about how the snow’s so high on the side of the roads you feel like you’re in an igloo driving down the road and why should they even bother to put anything in the icebox because it’ll all stay cold out in the car.

Valery’s gloves drop to the floor and he doesn’t bother to worry about that for once, because there’s something about what Boris is saying, the comfortable acceptance of it all, that makes him want to kiss him. So he does.

In the doorway to the kitchen, with their jackets still on and a sentence halfway out of Boris’ mouth, Valery kisses him, and then pulls away and then is surprised when Boris leans down towards him again. It’s soft and wanting, Valery’s mouth, and he opens it for Boris in a way he never really has for anyone else.

With Boris, there’s just—the ability to be vulnerable in a way he’s never experienced before.

Here in this house not owned by anyone but him, in a place he doesn’t know the name of, he feels sure of the path they’re about to take.

The way Boris kisses is all consuming, the same way he sets in on dinner in the evenings, and Valery starts to think maybe that’s because he makes it. Maybe his hunger has never really been for the second rate cabbage rolls of the slightly droopy dumplings he sets out on the table. Maybe it’s been for this, and for the fact that he had done it all.

It’s hard to fathom and he whines at the thought and at the way Boris has gripped his hip, pulling them together and letting him feel the hot, hot heat there.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, which is a lie, because he knows exactly what’s going on and exactly what to do, perhaps even more than Boris does. He’s thought about it often enough, fluttering thoughts behind his eyelids that he pushes away the second they appear. But here, with his hand gripping Boris’ arm and Boris half hard against his thigh, that seems like it may have been a mistake.

It’s a whirlwind from there, a sequence of events he struggles to follow the next morning. They do leave the groceries in the car and they shed their jackets on the kitchen floor. Boris bites a mark into the curve of his neck by the stairs and he sees stars. He feels tired when they get upstairs, out of breath, but unwilling to stop.

They fall into bed, his bed, and he realizes with startling clarity that they aren’t going to sleep apart ever again if he has anything to say about it.

He feels dizzy in Boris’ arms, delirious, and comes close to crying though he doesn’t know why. He wishes he could put his finger on why, but he _can’t_.

Half-dressed, he gets off on Boris’ hip and Boris flips him over and spends on his stomach, and that’s the last thing he really remembers. He wants to believe he remembers some mumbled words between them, and he does think something was said, but he can’t recall the exact details of the exchange.

Only that he wakes up with his forehead against Boris’ cheek, drooling on his shoulder and doesn’t even feel the need to be embarrassed.

From there, it’s simple and the only thing that kills him is the lasting knowledge that it could have been like this the whole time.

What was once his room becomes their room, and the spare room becomes a place where Boris fixes things. Radios and clocks and the spare cash register from the general store. He screws and unscrews lids and looks at circuitry that he has no right to understand and puts it all back in order.

He drives his American car around to houses and delivers fixed goods and newly made, wooden boxes, and Valery stays in the barn and scratches Lola behind the ears until he gets back.

Valery thinks he can see the dawning spring on the horizon, but it’s hard to say.

Mostly he sees Boris and the way Boris looks at him, which is intoxicating in a way that makes him think it’s okay that there’s nothing to drink here.

A couple months on and he’s laying back in bed and Boris is above him, and he really does start crying, which should be terrible and humiliating but just feels like a truth he has to tell.

He’s never been seen like this, fucked like this. Not like a one time thing, or an on the side addition. He’s often felt like something extra, like something someone couldn’t say no to, but didn’t really have much use for aside from this one singular act.

Boris—he grips the headboard as he fucks into Valery, and Valery shudders with each press inward, naturally quiet by way of habit but learning that he doesn’t have to be. Boris makes him feel like a towel that's swollen with water and then wrings him dry, every single time.

And still, afterwards, he asks what’s for dinner and if he can help. He talks to Valery about deliveries that need to be made and asks him if he wants to wash up and sit outside for a while.

It’s the thing about Boris that makes Valery feel what has to be, must be, _is_ love.

Boris stays.

—

They end up out on the porch as spring rolls around, snow melting and grass poking out—brown and brittle, but alive.

“I’m almost finished,” Valery says, standing so close to Boris their shoulders are touching and thinking nothing of it.

“Hm?” Boris is study, stalwart at his side.

“Your box, with the birds on it. I’ll have it finished in a month or two.” Valery thinks of all the small finishes he has to do, sanding down the minutely rough edges, staining the wood one last time, making sure the hinges hang just right.

“You know it doesn’t have to be perfect, don’t you?” Boris is looking at him askance and Valery feels the same way a garden must in this weather. Buried underneath the cold, but ready to grow once spring arrives. Never really gone.

“I know,” he says, “but for you, I want it to be.”

There’s a part of him that will always be in Pripyat, in Moscow, and in Vienna. A part of him that is left behind somewhere under the vast, unforgiving sky of the place where he lost everything. But for now his heart soars next to this man, and the sunset looks beautiful.

In the trees, the swallows are singing, and it’s a song he feels he’ll never forget.

**Author's Note:**

> swallows have been used in literature throughout the years to represent the idea of speaking openly about your feelings, particularly about love. one of the earliest examples is in the latin poem _pervigilium veneris_ , which reads "quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam?", or in english, "when will i be like the swallow, so that i can stop being silent?"


End file.
